Principal Investigator: Professor Terence Dwyer

1a: The inclusion of accelerometry as a measure on 100,000 UK Biobank Participants since 2012, and the recent development of a usable measure of physical activity based on it, provides a unique opportunity to improve understanding of the relationship of physical activity (PA) to major disease endpoints.

With the completion of linkage of subject data on death, hospital admission, and cancer registry, data by the end of 2015 we will be in a position to test the hypotheses that PA measured objectively is associated with mortality, CVD incidence, and cancer incidence – particularly for bowel, breast and prostate cancer.

1b: UK Biobank was established to provide opportunities to explore the relationship of environmental factors and their interaction with genes in the causation of disease. This project seeks to do just that for an important lifestyle variable – physical activity. What we are endeavouring to achieve can only be undertaken at this point with the unique resource that UK Biobank provides – the cutting edge lifestyle measure (PA), relevant genetic measures to permit the examination of gene-environment interactions, and the number of subjects to provide adequate power to undertake this investigation.

1c: We will investigate the association of physical activity, measured in the most up to date way using movement monitors, with the major causes of death – cardiovascular disease and cancer.

To better understand how physical activity might relate to risk of these diseases we will also examine whether the person’s genetic background might influence the way in which physical activity contributes to risk.

1d: We intend to examine data on the 100,000 subjects in the cohort that have used accelerometers since 2012